Hidden Seed
Hidden Seed: Bethlehem’s Forgotten Utopia is a play about the African, Native American and European women who participated in founding the city of Bethlehem in the 1740s and 1750s. The play was professionally produced as part of Touchstone Theatre’s Festival UnBound in October 2019 and was broadcast on PBS in November 2020. A second production is now in development.
Hidden Seed emerged from a collaboration between Touchstone Theatre (an SSI community partner since 2007) and the South Side Initiative. The play embodies SSI’s commitment to collaboration between humanities scholars and local artists in order to stimulate public dialogue about how we might cultivate a more democratic and egalitarian city. Drawing on a decade of historical research, Lehigh faculty member Seth Moglen wrote the script with the assistance of Bill George, Touchstone co-founder. After a week of performances, a public forum for residents and community leaders explored the kinds of equality we want in the city today and the fears we must overcome in order to realize them. The next production, currently scheduled for Fall 2021, will include an expanded series of community forums.
The Play
Hidden Seed tells the story of three of Bethlehem’s founders, who lived together for a time in the Single Sisters choir house on Church Street in the 1750s. A formerly enslaved West African woman, Magdalena lived in Bethlehem for 80 years, having witnessed the birth and transformation of the city. Anna was born to Lenape parents in the Lechauweeki (Lehigh) Valley and was adopted by the Moravians as a child after her parents died of smallpox. A German immigrant, Margaret became a Moravian missionary and a skilled linguist of Native American languages. Their ghosts have returned to the city today to share the story of the founders’ egalitarian achievement: the creation of a racially integrated city that abolished poverty, shared wealth equally, educated all, and freed women to become leaders in the community. These ghosts have an urgent message for the people of Bethlehem today, but they must confront painful truths about the city they loved and helped to build. Only by acknowledging the scars of slavery, the theft of native people’s land and the abandonment of their own successful communal economy, can Bethlehem’s founding mothers affirm the city’s egalitarian promise.
Why This Project Matters: Cultivating the Hidden Seed of Equality in Our City
Hidden Seed explores little-known truths about Bethlehem’s 18th-century founding in order to stimulate conversation about the kinds of equality we aspire to in our city today and about the fears and violent histories we must overcome in order to realize those aspirations.
People in Bethlehem are proud of our city’s long history, but few are aware of the founders’ astonishing egalitarian achievements or their betrayal of their own ideals. By presenting a fuller picture of our city’s origins, the play invites audiences to think more boldly about the kinds of equality we can achieve together and to reflect more honestly on the histories of exploitation that divide us.
Public Humanities, Public Arts
Hidden Seed embodies SSI’s commitment to collaborations between humanities scholars and local artists to promote civic dialogue.
Hidden Seed is based on years of historical research conducted by Seth Moglen (Lehigh Professor of English, Africana Studies & American Studies) for his book-in-progress, “Bethlehem: American Utopia, American Tragedy.” Bill George (Touchstone Theatre co-founder) proposed adapting material from Moglen’s manuscript for a play to be included in Touchstone’s ambitious Festival UnBound, a city-wide exploration of Bethlehem’s civic identity twenty years after the end of steel-making. With George’s help, Moglen wrote the script of Hidden Seed. The play was performed at the Single Sisters House, one of the original 18th-century Moravian choir houses on Church Street, a venue generously provided by our community partners at Historic Bethlehem Museum & Sites.
This collaboration transformed a scholar’s historical research and enabled it to reach a broad, general audience. The collaboration enabled a local theater company, with decades of experience in original community-based theater, to plumb the depths of our city’s history. It enabled performers and production designers to learn about that history, and to explore it with all the expressive and creative skills at their disposal. It enabled a diverse local audience to experience the city’s founding contradictions in an emotionally resonant form, open to varied interpretations. And it gave all of us an opportunity to discuss, together, the implications of this history for our city’s present and future.
Gravestone of Magdalena Beulah Brockden
18th Century Translation of Magdelena Beulah Brockden’s memoir (Lebenslauf)
Art and Democracy: Community Dialogue
After a week of performances at the Single Sisters House, we held at PBS/ Channel 39 a final performance followed by a community dialogue. We asked participants to reflect specifically on the kinds of equality they want today and the fears that are holding us back.
The dialogue began with brief comments by public officials (including a city councilwoman and the city’s director of community and economic development), nonprofit leaders, a university professor and an elementary school teacher, and a Lehigh student who had graduated from a local high school.
Members of the diverse audience discussed their own experiences of Bethlehem in relation to the history explored on stage. Some described the challenges faced by residents today and their yearning for the economic security, racial integration, universal access to health care, child care and elder care that they were surprised to learn had prevailed at the time of the city’s founding. Many were startled to learn that the city’s founders had enslaved Africans and built on land stolen from native people. Audience members struggled, together, with this complex history and shared their aspirations for the city’s future.
Many asked for future performances of the play, and opportunities to extend the community conversation, at local schools, libraries, community centers, houses of worship and seminaries.
Plans for a new production are now under way for Fall 2021.
Project Partners
South Side Initiative
Historic Bethlehem Museums & Sites
Lehigh University Theater Department
Lehigh University English Department, Literature & Social Justice Initiative
Project Partners
Directed by Laurie McCants
Written by Seth Moglen (with Bill George)
Cast
Anna: Candece Tarpley
Magdalena: Deirdre Van Walters
Margaret: Laurie McCants
Johann: Michael Duck
Production Team:
Designed by Melpomene Katakalos and Robin Brooke Perry
Music Composed and Performed by Michael Duck
Stage Manager: Jerry Matheny
Community Dialogue – opening panel:
– Winston Alozie, Director of the Bethlehem Boys & Girls Club;
– Jennie Gilrain, theater director and Freemansburg Elementary teacher (facilitator)
– Alicia Miller Karner, Director of Community & Economic Development for the City of Bethlehem;
– Olga Negron, Bethlehem City Councilwoman;
– Berto Sicard, Lehigh undergraduate Africana Studies and History major;
– Javier Toro, former Director of South Bethlehem Neighborhood Center;
– Stephanie Powell Watts, Lehigh English professor and novelist.
Production Sponsors:
Sahl Communications; Norris McLaughlin; Advent Moravian Church; Imagevolution; Unitarian Universalist Church of the Lehigh Valley.
Historical advice generously provided by Paul Peucker (Moravian Archives), Craig Atwood (Moravian Seminary), and Scott Paul Gordon (Lehigh English Department).
Publicity
New Festival UnBound uses theater to find better future for Lehigh Valley – Morning Call Feb. 2019.
Festival UnBound Blends Lehigh Scholars with Community Artists – Oct. 2019
Ghosts of Bethlehem’s past deliver an urgent message tonight! Oct. 7, 2019
Hidden Seed: Like Going to Mass in the Catacombs Oct 9, 2019